They don't teach this in schools,
the secret science of names.
You learn it from your breath.
What you know without
knowing how you know it
through the smokeless blue
flame in your sternum.
How to change the name of
your wound to
"Swarthy River of the
Mother's Grace,"
and the name of your sorrow
to "Fragrance of
Falling."
Learn how to name the
kiss that created you
from a well of parted lips.
Learn to stop signifying
emptiness
and call midnight
"Undulation of the Panther."
Learn sacred wariness, how
her silence stalks you.
Learn that the absence of a
story is the seed of light,
sprouting a blade whose fierceness
is defined
by what is honed away,
the fin of your pelvis
slicing green oceans
of moonlight before your
conception.
Learn that the Lord did not
create this garden.
You did, with Adam and
Lilith,
making up strange words,
exciting the laser
in your vagus nerve to
burn the original hole
in your bones, using the
brilliance
that creates by destroying,
not through meaning but through
sound,
the faint but piercing Hum of
blackness
that maddens honey-making
gods
until they spill the ointment
of prophecy
on your soft naked crown. Now
try it.
Invent a Word pregnant with a
New Creation,
a name that is magic
precisely because
it has never been
spoken.
Elves and jinns know how, so
do babies
babbling bija mantras of
ineffable power
from the unwritten scriptures
hidden in their
sacred physiology of hieroglyphic
neurons.
Um, Phwat, Bhang, Mama, Da.
Well done, child!
Belias, Archon of the Abyss,
Baoumiel, Angel of Your Left
Nipple,
Oroorothos, Ruling Power of
the Bellybutton,
Shaktarathel, Keeper of Your
Missing Rib,
Sandolfon, Harp of Unending
Exhalation.
The broken measuring cup of
your mouth
contains a terrible sea.
You learn that the true Word
is listening.
You name the darkest
fear
by simply hearing its
fingers scratch
the glass of your
sleeplessness.
You hear tuskéd chthonic
species groan
from crystal shadows of
extinction.
You hear dangerous saints and
mystic criminals
singing voluptuous praise
songs
from the silence that tried
to erase them.
You hear the primordial
heresy of
countless zeros echoing the One.
And if you listen truly, you
hear
the background sigh of the
Big Bang
in each atom of your body.
You learn it from your
breath.
Sometimes forgetting the Name
is remembering God.